For six years, the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Index has been a tool to hold the United States accountable to the commitments made nearly three decades ago at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, where 180 countries developed a human rights framework for global development that explicitly promoted SRHR for women and girls globally.

The 15^th anniversary of World Contraception Day (WCD) on September 26^th was a perfect moment to renew the commitment to increase awareness and knowledge about contraceptive methods. But the availability of safe and effective methods is not enough. Reproductive autonomy, which is defined as “having the power to decide about and control matters associated with contraceptive use, pregnancy, and childbearing,” is also a central tenet of both WCD and the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. People must be supported in making their own decisions about their sexual and reproductive health, including if and how they become pregnant.

On November 15, the world population is projected to reach 8 billion people. As we approach that milestone, there’s no denying that our rapidly growing human population also places extraordinary pressure on the environment. The human population has doubled in the last 50 years, while wildlife populations have been cut in half.

For many people, stillbirth— the occurrence of a fetal death at 20+ week’s gestation—is a concept. A statistic. Each year, at least 23,000 stillbirths occur in the United States. It occurs in one out of every 160 pregnancies. Yet when these numbers become a reality in your own life, they take on a new meaning.

We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.

“Globally women and girls continue to face barriers to access healthcare services—whether it be transport costs, financial costs, or even language barriers,” said Shakira Choonara, Technical Specialist with the World Health Organization (WHO) at a recent launch event of the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) and Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Learning by Sharing Portal (LSP).

In its June 2022 decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned decades of precedent to strike down the constitutional right to abortion. This ruling—and a shift in regulatory power over abortion to individual states—is having a profound impact in American society. Already, a record number of abortion measures are on ballots to protect or abolish abortion rights. In many states, the fight over abortion access continues to take place in courtrooms. Far from settling the matter, the Supreme Court’s ruling showcases the deep divide over abortion in American society.

While the world’s population now approaches 8 billion people, global fertility rates have been declining for decades. The overall drivers of this decline include increased access to contraception and reproductive health care, an increase in women seeking higher education, women’s empowerment in the workforce, lower rates of child mortality globally, increased cost of raising children, and overall greater gender equality.